The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  It was a very hot morning, a heatwave having swept in from the west. The health inspectors and passport-control officials were as yet but a dream nurtured by suspicious bureaucrats. There were no waiting rooms or delousing halls, no chalk lines drawn on the trunks or labels pinned to the nervous immigrants’ clothes by uniformed officials. A few lodging houses flanked the quayside. Some “runners” from various hotels and routes met the passengers on the gangway, holding out tickets to the riverboats and contracts for mining concessions in the great lakes up north.

  In the ship’s passenger list, preserved at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Hercule Barfuss is listed as passenger #67. His name is written in capitals. There is no mention of nationality. What is noted is that he lacks an emigration passport from a European authority and that he is deaf and dumb.

  That is all. He is simply a name in an anonymous mass of travellers, and the thought cannot be avoided that had he arrived two decades later he would almost certainly have been refused entry.

  He spends a few nights in Manhattan. In his diary he writes about the “spirit of freedom” pervading the city. With the help of the dockside authorities he acquires his identity papers. At the same time he anglicises his name to Barefoot.

  In mid-June 1838 Hercule arrived at Martha’s Vineyard. This we know from his own notes and from the population register for Tisbury County, where he is entered under the name D.H. Barefoot. What the letter D stands for isn’t clear. “Deaf” maybe? He would tell my father how happy he had felt to be surrounded by others with the same hearing handicap. No-one seems to have reacted much to his physiognomy. As usual he wore a mask, but by that time only covering the lower part of his face. He had been told in Paris he had exceptionally beautiful eyes.

  Inspired by his stay at the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets, he picked up the local sign language in record time, and wrote English almost as quickly.

  The Rev. Robertson, clergyman in Chilmark parish, got him a secretarial job. He translated documents and religious writings from German – that same year some sixty deaf people arrived on the island from Austria. Alongside his everyday duties he worked as a stand-in organist. No-one questioned the fact that he could play the instrument despite his handicap, or that he did so with his toes.

  During the last few years of the decade he personally developed a sign language for feet. This was a simplified form of French sign language for hands, worked out dialectically, and used on the island. Within a very short period of time it was comprehensible to those in his immediate vicinity, and was later to spread among others with similar handicaps.

  I recall from the days of my childhood how he would write down anything he wanted to say with a chalk on a small blackboard which he always carried around with him. When he wanted to add something, ask questions, or give an answer, he would rub out the previous sentence with a sponge and write down a new one. I remember how fascinated I was by the dexterity of his feet and what perfect control he had over his toes, every bit as elaborate as a normal person has over their fingers.

  One thing that puzzled those around him, were his financial means. In some way, prior to his departure from Europe, he must have come across a large sum of money. He lived well, better than most on the island, but never commented on his economy. My father assumed he had received a grant, from von Below, perhaps, with whom he had shared the tragedy of losing a much-loved woman. Or perhaps it was money he had put aside with Henriette Vogel. It is not inconceivable that by using his gift he had embezzled a sum of money from someone he considered deserved such a fate.

  In 1841 he had a house built in Chilmark, not far from the vicarage. It still stands; a solidly built two-storey whitewashed building, testifying to considerable wealth in the owner. This building contract he gave to a local company whose craftsmen and carpenters were, without exception, deaf.

  That same year he met a woman, Sonya Pereira. They lived together without getting engaged. Less than a year later she gave birth to a daughter, Charlotte, christened after Barefoot’s daughter with Henriette Vogel. At that time he had no contact with his daughter in Europe. It wasn’t until the 1890s when, quite by chance, he got news of her through a Swedish immigrant who had moved to that country.

  He had two more daughters with Sonya, both of whom died in early childhood. At that time, the late 1840s, he had already become famous in sign-language circles in America.

  He worked as assistant editor on the first American sign-language grammar book while taking an MA examination in English at Boston University. In 1847 the Baltimore publisher J. Cooper published his book about the history of the deaf: History of the Deaf and Dumb, a three-hundred-page illustrated folio publication. He wrote in chronological order, starting with hieroglyphics and Plato’s “Kratylos” in which, for the very first time in literature, sign language is mentioned. Famous deaf people are presented, from Roman Quintus Pedius, whom Pliny mentions, to the Spanish court artist El Mudo, the “Iberian Titian” who, together with Lope de Vega, was considered to be the most cultured of all men at the court of Philip II in Madrid.

  A quote from Leviticus 19:14 serves as the book’s motto: “Thou shalt not curse the deaf.” The underlying sentiment is that of Christian humanism and the notion of the equal value of all men, as expressed in the American Declaration of Independence. In a lengthy passage St Augustine, who asserted “the ear is the gate to salvation”, is pilloried for despising the deaf, as too is Samuel Heinecke, the German oralist, who had been feuding with Barefoot’s number-one idol the Abbé l’Epée, founder of the deaf school in Paris.

  Barefoot wrote about deaf people’s pantomime theatres in ancient Rome and the first methodical deaf teachers: John de Beverly, Archbishop of York in the 700s, and Rudolf Agricola of Gröningen, philosopher in Heidelberg in the late Middle Ages. He translated sizeable chunks of Hieronymus Cardanus’ Paralipomenon in which that renowned Italian physician points at the possibility of educating the deaf through the written word. He also refers to Jean Marc Itard’s “Discourse on ears and hearing ailments”, at that time a sadly neglected work, in which various types of hearing handicaps are, for the first time, medically classified. The book is illustrated with woodcuts. One of them, Juan Pablo Bonet’s famous leather tongue, shows how he taught his deaf students the positions of the speech organs in the formation of various sounds. Another shows John Bulwer’s Chirologia, a collection of manual gestures in pictorial form, paving the way for modern-day sign language.

  The book never became the standard work Barefoot and the publisher had hoped it would. It came out in a modest edition: three-hundred copies, of which half never left the stockroom. In the only copy Barefoot owned, which was later inherited by my uncle, I particularly recall the reproduction of George Delgarno’s glove – in which the alphabet was painted in different areas of the palm of the hand. With a deft touch of the finger on the different letters it was a practical way of communicating with the deaf. Delgarno’s intention was that this system should be widely spread and that the glove, once one had learned the position of the letters, would no longer be needed. It was, so to speak, a kind of organic typewriter. My father claimed that at one time Alexander Graham Bell had had plans for mass-producing the invention and introducing it into American schools for the deaf.

  A particularly critical chapter in the book is dedicated to the Swiss Johann Konrad Amman’s books, Deaf People Can Speak and Dissertatio de Loquela – two works which formed the basis for the German oral method in which emphasis is laid on getting those with hearing deficiencies to use their speech organs and to lip-read, which Barefoot opposed. In the book’s postscript, perhaps as a covert allusion to his gift, Barefoot criticises Defoe’s novel about the deaf prophet Duncan Campbell: “Both”, he sneers disdainfully, “strike me as charlatans.”

  In March 1848, ten years after his arrival, Hercule suddenly left Martha’s Vineyard. No reason for his departure is to be found in his writings and diaries, or gained from asking his nearest and d
earest. Maybe it was grief over the loss of his two daughters. Or maybe, as some say, he was driven on by a spirit of adventure. My grandfather, who was the offspring of a later relationship with the seamstress Josephine Smith, believed the departure to have been precipitated by an illicit affair with his mother, who was at that time working in Barefoot’s household. The reason for his leaving, so my grandfather said, was that he didn’t want to make the scandal worse than it already was. Personally, I believe he was motivated by other reasons, such as Henriette Vogel.

  Leafing through his diaries from that period of time, it is apparent that she is ever more on his mind. He longs for her to appear again, to “speak” to him from the other side. He misses her and longs for her more than he has done for many years. It was Henriette he had loved since early childhood, and her he would go on loving until the end of time. The other women in his life, Sonya Pereira and, later on, Josephine Smith, could never measure up to Henriette. He appreciated their friendship, and treated them, as mothers of his children, with the greatest respect. But it was Henriette who continued to be the meaning of his existence. Under such circumstances it is not impossible he was beset by restlessness or felt claustrophobic in the company of women who craved his undivided love.

  He travelled by paddle steamer across Lakes Ontario and Superior to Minnesota, and from there on by caravan with a company of settlers via North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Oregon, until he reached California and the Sacramento Valley in the autumn of 1848.

  He is said to have been lured by rumours of gold deposits. With childlike pride he would afterwards claim to have been one of the so-called “Forty-eighters”, that is, to have arrived with the first wave of gold seekers to San Francisco; not with the larger group which came in ’49 when the gold rush was already a fact.

  He stayed in north California for a year. Together with a Danish adventurer he bought a mining concession outside Sonora. After only a couple of months, however, their collaboration was on the rocks. In a letter to his daughter (formally addressed to a seven-year-old girl, but equally directed to the abandoned Sonya Pereira) he wrote that the Dane complained increasingly over the manual workload he single-handedly had to carry. Given the nature of Barefoot’s handicaps, he could hardly be of much help with the heavy toil of panning, digging and ditching. But it was he who had financed their investments and paid for their keep. The Dane, he wrote, had also been trying to cheat him out of his money.

  That winter he acquired another mining concession at Diamond Springs, El Dorado County. Now he had six contracted Indians working for him; but the concession proved poor in gold and the men left when he had difficulties in paying their wages.

  There are several more letters to his daughter over the following years. He resided in rural Los Angeles, and for some time in Tennessee. In the Southern States he was deeply upset by the cruelty of the slave trade, and sent letters to acquaintances in Washington pleading vehemently for its abolition. In New Orleans he worked for a while in a newly established school for the deaf, where even black children with hearing handicaps were included among the students. After a while, though, he looked northward; the American railroads were being extended along the east coast and it was this route which carried him onward.

  For the second time in his life he came to New York, and set about writing a love story of which only fragments remain. The novel was never given a title and according to his own testimony he wrote only five of the planned twenty chapters before abandoning the project for lack of motivation. The story, he told my father, was of Henriette Vogel’s life, written in a style reminiscent of Stendhal, and having the Frenchman’s “crystallisation” metaphor as its basis. In the fragments that remain, a total of ten pages from two chapters, there is not a trace of sorrow over the girl’s horrific fate. Instead, the text is saturated with a feeling of warmth, confidence and blind faith in love as a power of good that triumphs over evil.

  Then in March 1853 he returned to Martha’s Vineyard having been away for five years. After that he only ever left the island twice during the rest of his life.

  I know Barefoot was happy and continued to be so until his death. The mildness he exuded was drawn as much from human wisdom as from the sense of harmony he felt within himself and in those around him. In his old age he was a patriarch surrounded by a family of loving women, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  His attractiveness to the opposite sex was an enigma. After all, his appearance had, for most of his life, frightened women off. But love, as is well known, can crop up in all manner of guises. Maybe it was his sense of security that drew them to him. Or a longing for something he couldn’t give them: namely the wholehearted love he’d reserved for Henriette.

  Over the years he became an institution on the island. He was regarded as a wise old man to whom one could turn for help, whatever the problem. Never once did I hear anyone describe him as deformed or as a monster. To everyone on the island, he was Hercules Barefoot – a master and a diplomat of high standing.

  As far as his gift was concerned, he kept it a secret from all but his immediate family. Besides which, he used it less and less frequently. It was as if he had learned to consciously switch it off. Perhaps he endeavoured to attain some kind of normality, to be merely one among others, and this is just what he could be in Martha’s Vineyard, in a society of the deaf which he’d made his own. On the island there had always been a greater degree of tolerance towards those who were different, even among those who could hear. Besides, Barefoot had an almost masterly grasp of English as a written language, and his understanding of sign language, too, was exemplary. Seated, he used his feet to make signs. Thus his gift was no longer of vital importance, he had other idioms. Now that he at last belonged somewhere, he managed better without it.

  Yet there were still occasions when he made use of it. Sometimes, jokingly, he would whisper something inside us, or reveal what was in our thoughts, just to score a comic point. But he was discreet, and avoided anything too personal. I remember that there were rumours about him being able to make himself invisible, but only to people in positions of authority, methodist clergy or the Irish police constable. Even after his death he was still an object for all kinds of tales. Like Störtebecker in north Germany or Dick Turpin in England, he has become a part of local folklore.

  As far as his gift for making himself invisible was concerned, I myself witnessed this phenomenon on a couple of occasions in my childhood. It was exceedingly strange. All of a sudden he would be standing right in front of you, though you’d swear the room had been empty just seconds before. It was as if he could decide when he was ready to be detected. You could be somewhere for several hours, in his study for example, or in the garden outside his house, before discovering that Barefoot too was there. The sound of someone clearing their throat might come from the armchair, or from the desk, and only then would you discover his presence. Innumerable are the accounts of people who maintain they passed right by him on a road or in the aisle of a church and only noticed him afterwards. It is impossible to find an explanation and, in my opinion, some things are best left unexplained. But perhaps the fact of the matter is that his gift taught him how one can eradicate the idea of oneself in others.

  To me he was mainly great-grandfather, a relatively ordinary old man, short of stature, and with the lower half of his face hidden by a mask, but for those of us who knew him, he was part of our everyday life. We all loved him dearly and admired him for his goodness and generosity; and the grief we felt when he died was not of this world. He was one of the kindest and most loving people I have ever met, always close to laughter, but also to despair over the sorry state of our world.

  Among the photographs which remain of him there is one I often take out and look at across the illusory distance to a moment in our existence we call time. It was taken one morning in August 1908 in Martha’s Vineyard. My grandfather’s father, Barefoot, is sitting in the arbour at a table laid for breakfast, surrounde
d by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He is looking straight into the camera and one almost discerns a smile beneath his mask. His eyes, those dark, beautiful eyes, radiate a happiness that can only be communicated by the sign language of the deaf, where the look in the eyes is so important a part of the idiom.

  I can see what that look in his eyes expresses: blind faith in love as a power so strong it can overcome death, and that he himself will soon, very soon, be reunited with Henriette Vogel, his beloved.

  Tisbury, 1994

  Jonathan Barefoot

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  Epub ISBN: 9781448113750

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  Published by Vintage 2006

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  Copyright © Carl-Johan Vallgren 2002, 2005

  English translation copyright © Paul and

  Veronica Britten-Austin 2005

  Carl-Johan Vallgren has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work